Schedule

Vital strategic advice for anyone involved in running a tech business, big or small. In today’s computing world, it can feel like we’re drowning in wave after wave of new trends. This sea of concepts is simply the evolution of our industry from a product to a service based economy. Learn how to navigate this change to your advantage, and find a balance between the present and the future.

Media organizations are using open source to stretch their budgets further. And as more content platforms continue to emerge, open source projects provide alternative modes of development. But what does this paradigm look like on the ground? The returns can be huge. But not everything is rose-colored. Through NPR’s experiences with Android, Chrome, and more, we can chart some of these waters.

We are more than a decade into the widespread use of open source in business, but there is too much focus on the compliance only, and the “risks” of using open source code. This talk is about moving beyond compliance and making the positive case for using open source in business based on reduced cost, improved time-to-market, and yes, freedom.

Security and open source have a history that goes back to an era long before computers. The story begins with 19th century linguist Auguste Kerckhoffs and his principle that security isn’t found in obscurity. We will cover the intertwined and lesser-known history of security and open source from then to now, with his big idea as a guiding principle, making a compelling argument for open source.

Studying our most popular open source projects we find that 9 are significantly larger, roughly 10x, than any of the other projects. These “XtraLarge” projects have some notable characteristics that are interesting to anyone wanting to grow his/her open source project to similar magnitude and importance. Ex: All are collaborative non-profit community projects, with modular software architectures.